Vernon Sends Personnel, Equipment To Monson, MA, to Help with Tornado Relief

Vernon sent emergency crews to Monson, MA, early this evening to assist with the aftermath of a powerful tornado that touched down in the border town.

When he called in a report from the scene to the local headquarters, Asst. Fire Chief Steve Eppler said sections of Monson were "really mangled."

According to the National Weather Service, local law enforcement reported that a tornado touched down in Westfield, MA.

An amateur radio operator reported seeing a tornado in the Springfield area. The tornado was moving along the Massachusetts-Connecticut border, and those living along that corridor had been warned to take precaution.

One then hit Monson, just north of Stafford, just after the evening rush.

Mayor Jason McCoy said the Tolland County Mutual Aid system was activated at about 6 p.m.

"It's scary,'' McCoy said. "I can't believe a tornado hit Springfield, Mass.  It's just too much.''

McCoy said the reports he was getting indicated a level of "hysteria" in Monson.

Fire Chief William Call said that a crew of about 20 was dispatched first to a staging area in Stafford and then to Monson itself. The town sits north of Stafford, accessed by winding, country roads.

"We are getting reports of a lot of collapsed houses,'' Call said. "We sent in two of our ATVs because it was the only way to get around in some places.''

The two all-terrain vehicles were called in after Vernon already had sent in three heavier vehicles, including an ambulance, call said.

Vernon was included in the National Weather Service Tornado Watch the entire evening. Both McCoy and Call said Vernon still had plenty of coverage if something had happened A powerful thunderstorm ripped through the town at about 8:40 p.m.

"We had plenty of stuff still here,'' Call said.

"We had some calls about our coverage, but we assured everyone who called that we were well-protected here,'' McCoy said. "Just because a town is separated from us by a state border does not mean we cannot consider it a neighbor in need.'

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Weiner's tweet-hearts

It takes a certain type of woman to set his heart a-Twitter.
Rep. Anthony Weiner follows only a select 198 of his nearly 49,000 Twitter fans -- and a surprising number of them are total babes.
Yesterday, outside his DC office, the model-loving, married congressman testily refused to talk about the pretty women he's following.
He flashed a tight, uncomfortable smile and avoided eye contract as he tried to deflect point-blank questions from reporters about whether or not he had sent a crotch shot of himself in underwear to a 21-year-old co-ed in Seattle.
Was it from you or not," demanded CNN's Capitol Hill producer Ted Barrett. To which the squirming Weiner replied:
"If I were giving a speech to 45,000 people and someone in the back threw a pie or yelled out an insult, I would not spend the next two hours of my speech responding to that pie or that insult.
"I would return to the things that I want to talk about to the audience that I want to talk to. That is what I intend to do this week."
Then in another cringeworthy exchange, the Brooklyn-Queens Democrat unloaded a snarky insult instead of saying why he didn't pass on to Capitol Police his claim that his Twitter account had been hacked -- which would be a federal crime.
"I'm going to have to ask that we follow some rules here. One of them is going to be you ask questions and I'll do the answers. That seem reasonable? . . . You do the questions, I do the answers, and this jackass interrupts me?" a fuming Weiner said of Barrett.
But reporters persisted, asking Weiner if he followed the co-ed on Twitter and whether he had other "young women followers" -- with one barking: "Answer the question!"
Instead, the famously temperamental Weiner looked annoyed, rolled his shoulders and argued -- but never said whether or not he sent the picture.
"This is now Day Three," he intoned. "You have statements that my office has put out. And there are going to be people . . . this is the tactic. The guy in the back of the room who's throwing the pie or yelling out the insult wants that to be the conversation."
He took more tacks than a sailboat as he tried to not explain the Twitter tempest.
"Look, this was a prank that I've now been talking about for a couple of days," he said. "I'm not going to allow it to decide what I talk about for the next week or the next two weeks.
"And so, I'm not going to be giving anything more about that today. I think I've been pretty responsive."
Though visibly angry -- and often combative -- the congressman tried to squeeze in one lame joke, bragging that he "passed [Tea Party favorite Rep.] Michele Bachmann today in the number of Twitter followers. I will give you that fact."

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